THE NEWGATE CHAPLAINS: SAMUEL SMITH, PAUL LORRAIN, THOMAS PURENEY—THE PRISON LIFE
The Chaplains, or Ordinaries, of Newgate were amply provided for. The presentation to the office was in the gift of the Lord Mayor and aldermen, and included a residence in Newgate street, in addition to the salary, a legacy of £10 a year paid by the Governors of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, an annual £6 from Lady Barnardiston's legacy, and what are described as "two freedoms yearly," which generally sold for £25 each. In addition to these, the city usually presented the Ordinary with one other, annually. By 1779 it appears that he no longer enjoyed the freedoms, but his salary was augmented to £180, and, in addition, he received £3 12s. 0d. a year from the sheriffs.
Surely this was a stipend ample enough for the class of men who held the office, especially as the divines who generally obtained it did very well out of the "authentic" lives of the criminals to whom they extended ghostly counsel. The "Bishop of Newgate" was the slang term for the Ordinary, and so well—though not so admirably—did the men, who, in a long succession, filled the office, fit into the place, that we but rarely find one translated to other fields of activity. They lived and died Ordinaries of Newgate. Even a good man might have become degraded by the place and its fearful management, but the men appointed were of the worst type, and a disgrace to the Church.
The Reverend Paul Lorrain and the Reverend Thomas Pureney were typical Ordinaries, blusterous, bloated, and snuffy; ready with a threadbare tag from an easy classic; profaning the Scriptures with vinous hiccoughs; more keen to nose a revelation for their delectable broadsides and hypocritical pamphlets than to lead a sinner to repentance, even if they knew the way; and always with an alert eye on the main chance.
Lorrain succeeded one Samuel Smith in 1698, and held the post until his death, in 1719. He was most diligent in the production of those "official" accounts of the lives, confessions, and last dying speeches of the criminals, which were printed and sold largely, and thus formed a considerable augmentation to the salary of himself and his kind. A collection of forty-eight of these curious pamphlets, written by him, is found in the British Museum. We turn to them with expectancy, but from them with disgust. With every advantage at their command in this peculiar form of authorship, the Reverend Paul Lorrain and his successors failed to produce anything but the most insufficient of lives, the most commonplace confessions, and the most threadbare last dying speeches, garnished with haphazard texts.
Generally published at eight in the morning of the day after the respective executions, they had their public; but the very cream of the sale was skimmed off on the actual day of the execution by unlicensed publications, and it was usually quite easy for the doomed men going to Tyburn to purchase a penny biography of themselves, and to read what they had said at the last moment, before the last moment itself was reached. In Hogarth's print of the end of the Idle Apprentice at Tyburn, the "Last Dying Speech and Confession of Thomas Idle" is being bawled out at the moment of his hearing the final ministrations in the cart. Obviously, these productions could not be "authentic," in so far, at least, as the concluding scenes were concerned; but there is that journalistic flair about many of those that have survived the bad paper and the worse ink with which they were produced, which shows a full comprehension of what the public wanted. And whatsoever the public wants, it is the journalist's business to see it duly gets. There is more resource, more touch with life, in these than in the works of the Ordinaries.
A certain low and undistinguished feeling of pedantry runs through all those clerical issues. The Reverend Mr. Paul Lorrain, or the equally Reverend Mr. Thomas Pureney, tells us of such and such an one, that, "departing from the early paths of Virtue and Integrity, where the Flowers of Innocency may be pluckt," (much they knew of such things, to be sure!) "he stray'd among the Profligate and the Abandon'd, and became a Highway Man."
Such stuff! All very well for copy-book maxims or good books for well-behaved children; but the streets wanted stronger meat than this; and they got it. In the unauthorised lives of the various malefactors, written for the appreciation of the crowd, it may be read how such a youthful innocent as the one described above in so sesquipedalian a style, "was a practis'd prig at eleven years of age. He stole his Father's Cash-Box, and, coming with it to London, spent the Contents in the gayeties of the Town." Precocious youth! But precocity is not, as many suppose, a Twentieth-Century portent.
"He soon became a Flash Cull and set up half a dozen Doxies of his own, who empty'd his Pockets as soon as he filled 'em." Nothing at all about the early paths of Virtue and Integrity in this, it will be observed.